The Internet is a wondrous place. The most convenient and massive source of information. You have the luxury of accessing any web-site with a simple mouse click. Particularly useful for students. It allows everyone to find and compile all the relevant information quickly; explore popular tourist destinations; find recipes for tasty meals or maybe even get some professional help from Australian assignment writers.

The way we work has changed. Our laptops, tablets and smartphones let us do our job from wherever we want – at the office, at home or even while on-the-move. We can also freely chat and collaborate with colleagues, customers or suppliers one-to-one or in groups using an array of cloud-based productivity apps. When it comes to mobile, the conventional security model is broken. Traditional detection and software patching techniques simply cannot keep pace. In its place, arguably one of the most reliable ways to keep sensitive proprietary data safe is mobile VPN.

Once upon a time a mobile phone was something we used for talking. Today making a call ranks sixth on the list of most common uses for a mobile phone. Now there’s a new kid on the block that, in time, will push making a call even lower down the list. Mobile payment, or m-payment, is taking off. Early adopters like Starbucks already attribute significant revenue gains to their investment in mobile. Although overall mobile payments adoption and usage rates are still a fraction of standard credit/debit card transactions industry watchers expect this to change very quickly.

BYOD? CYOD? Given the slew of acronyms flying around mobile device management (which, of course, goes by the acronym “MDM”), you’d be forgiven for losing track of what some of these actually stand for, much less the concepts they represent. As offices increasingly embrace digital technology and enable more employees to work remotely, mobile devices like phones and tablets, not to mention laptops, have increasingly phased out the traditional desktop computer. But this paradigm shift is also opening a lot of sore spots and potential security vulnerabilities around corporate data– after all, it may be more convenient for employees to be able to send work emails from their personal phones, but what kind of liability does that create for the company when their sensitive material is stored in an employee’s private cloud storage? This raises further questions about where exactly a company should expect to draw the line between personal and business use on a mobile device. The business should allow a certain degree of convenience for the employee using their device, but at the same time, it’s important to ensure there are adequate security protocols in place. To that end, it’s worth dissecting just what exactly your MDM options are: BYOD: Under a Bring-Your-Own-Device policy, employees use their own personal phones or tablets for business purposes. This policy provides the greatest flexibility to employees in terms of familiarity – it’s their own phone, after all – but it also raises some privacy concerns, for both the company and the user. In fact, 57 percent of employees polled in a Bitglass survey said they opted out of their company’s...

If you were a hacker targeting a network, which would be most appealing – a network contained in a residential building, an office or corporate facility, or a public place? The information contained on the network of a residential building probably wouldn’t be particularly valuable, and it would also be well-protected. You’d face even more security if trying to attack a corporate network, so that probably wouldn’t be your best option either. You’d probably target a public network – one in an airport, coffee shop or hotel – over which users dealing with sensitive information would try to connect, perhaps without having the same security protections they would have if they were in their home or office. Public networks can be vulnerable, and they do make popular targets. Consider all the possible threats – from snooping and evil twin schemes to narrowband jamming and replay attacks – hackers can deploy against these networks. It’s also important to consider that there are now many more public hotspots than there were even a few years ago – global Wi-Fi hotspots are expected to triple from 1.3 million in 2011 to 5.8 million this year. For business users in particular, hotspot connections are ideal for when they’re at day-long events (when using mobile data on their phone or tablet would quickly drain their battery) or when they travel abroad (to avoid costly roaming fees). For these users, and for anyone else who relies on hotspots for secure remote access, NCP engineering has integrated Automatic Hotspot Logon into its NCP Secure Client. How It Works A safeguard protecting the end device against attack...

“Try to please everyone, and you’ll end up pleasing no one.” This is one of those classic, ubiquitous statements that can apply to any number of situations. Take the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend. To the employees whose jobs are made easier and more convenient by BYOD, the appeal of these initiatives is obvious. That’s why demand for BYOD is expected to increase by 25 percent between 2014 and 2019, driven by the consumerization of IT and increased mobile data speeds that meet enterprise-acceptable levels. Yet, on the other side of the spectrum, are the IT departments tasked with enforcing BYOD security frameworks. The same things that employees see as beneficial about BYOD – convenience and freedom of choice – are exactly what make IT departments so fearful. The two groups are fundamentally at odds. Users want, and demand, access to a broad range of personal mobile devices in the workplace. They want to be able to safely access work files on their phones while on-the-go and work from their homes on their personal laptops. Meanwhile, IT departments are tasked with protecting network security at all costs, and that means they are the ones who have to say “no,” and who have to restrict the technology employees are permitted to use in the workplace. That’s how BYOD “pleases no one” – users are frustrated by what they perceive to be restrictions on free use, while IT feels like it’s constantly engaged in an uphill fight against employees who frequently, both purposely and unwittingly, violate best practices around secure remote access VPN and BYOD. It’s the classic case of unstoppable force (in...